The Exit Coach

by Megan Staffel

  The feed store is at the top of the hill. As I moved through the shelves of animal supplies to the counter, a woman called out in a plucky voice, “What can we get you today?”

  “Do you have minerals for goats?”

  “Sure do. Comes in small and large.”

  “Do you have a hoof-trimming tool?”

  “No, but let me get Joe.” She laughed, and her voice dropped to a rasp. “Not that he’s a hoof-trimming tool, but he’s the one who will know.”

  “Wire cutters,” Joe told me. “Ordinary wire cutters from the hardware store. They’ll do it better.” He had the same stocky build as the woman at the register. “How many goats you got?” he asked companionably.

  When I told him the story, he whistled. “Wearing a jester collar in Christmas colors? If that critter been running since Christmas, he must be a mighty smart animal. Better watch out. He’s gonna be hard to contain. And if he goes, best thing probably be to let him. He’s a survivor, I’d say.”

  I found everything else I needed, and while I was paying for it, the door opened, letting in a gust of cold air, and a woman said, “You the one ordered this weather? Got to talk to you ’bout that.”

  “Hi, Darla!” the woman at the register called. To me she said, “That’ll be twenty-two ninety-seven.”

  “Wasn’t me ordered this weather,” Joe chimed back. “Musta been Burdett.”

  “Then get that troublemaker out here now so’s I can talk to him!”

  I turned to look more closely at this woman who so effectively took center stage, and when my glance reached her eyes, she looked right back and said, “Ramona Brightner.” She came towards me, holding out her hand. “Very pleased to meet you. We’re neighbors. In a fashion. My two hayfields back onto your property. And I know Shephard. I’m Darla Oswald, head of the school board and a great fan of your husband.” But then her attention turned. “There you are, Burdett! They tell me you’re the one ordered this weather. You and me have a little talking to do.”

  An old farmer stood by the back door. “Just for you, Darla. I got a personal request line, straight to the almighty weather man, and I said very plainly, we want an old-time February, no climate change nonsense; we want nights below minus ten and days in the single digits. Kills the mosquitoes. Come on. You’ll be grateful. Deep cold in the winter makes for a summer without pests. It’s true. You wait and see.” He hooked a hand in his overall strap. The other sleeve of his jacket was armless.

  “What you need?” he asked without a pause, and she went into a long recitation of supplies.

  I said, “So you’re the one who makes all those round bales on the field below us.”

  She cackled. “Yes, ma’am! Thirty rounds from either side of you, ten one field, twenty the other. You Brightners are a wedge right in the middle. Sort of strange. But way back, when it was all one piece, your acres must have been sold off to a relative. Made sense back then, and now, well, that’s what we have to work with.”

  “I was wondering… I’m going to need hay, because I just got a goat. Next summer, could we buy some? Wouldn’t need much. It’s just one.”

  She threw her head back, blond hair tumbling, a gloved hand reaching up as she cried, “Oh no! Sweetheart, one goat will never do. They’re herd animals. Just like horses. You have to have two or more.” She pulled off her long black leather gloves—city gloves, not country gloves—and cackled again. “That’s exactly how I started. Now I have twenty-three.”

  My first client that afternoon was a man who works outdoors as a surveyor. His body is starved for warmth, so I make the little room I rent behind the salon as warm as possible, and I set the electric pad on my table at high. I hold my hands in front of the heater before I touch him, and sometimes I set a hot, towel-wrapped rock in the middle of his belly or back while I massage his limbs. With him it’s not emotional—it’s body stress caused by wind and cold.

  I am the only practitioner I know who doesn’t use background music. Lots of people, as you work on them, have things to say, and silence gives them that chance.

  Bruce likes to talk. Occasionally, he talks too much, but I’m not afraid to tell him when it’s time to be quiet. He’s a big man, six-three at least, and over two hundred pounds. He’s also an ugly man. I don’t know why that’s important, but it makes me want to help him even more. I do a lot of work in the trapezius. I warm his shoulders, stroking and gliding, using smooth, continuous motions, talking to the muscles. I use all of my weight, pushing in, pulling back, working to loosen the fascia. His shoulders are big and meaty, tufted with hair. The oil darkens and flattens it, and when the skin is supple, I knead him like dough.

  The room I rent is small and, as I explained before, very warm. I keep the light low and am very careful, as I move around the table, never to brush against his body, careful to keep it draped as I use knuckles and forearms along his spine, unlocking the tension. It still amazes me that in just an hour I can make this large, wind-battered man relaxed and pliant.

  In the winter, Bruce comes once a week. He talks, mostly about his crew, the two or three kids he hired just out of college. He likes them. He loves them, actually, and seems, at least to me, to get too involved in their personal problems. But today he was talking about something else.

  “You know the McCarthy place on Hartsville Hill? Been surveying it. Two hundred acres, all flat, with a stream, woods, and cleared portions. They’re selling it off to speculators.”

  “Speculators?”

  “For big bucks.”

  “What kind of speculators?” No one could be thinking of building a housing development in a place as isolated as Hartsville Hill.

  “Gas. Marcellus Shale gas. You know about that, don’t you?”

  I try to keep the problems of the world out of my room, but they slip in regardless. “I’ve wanted to forget it,” I told him. “I’ve been hoping that if I didn’t pay attention it would go away.”

  “It’s not going away; there’s big money out there. There’s leasing agents—they’re crawling all over us right now, trying to get landowners to sign away mineral rights. And landowners, they’re forming coalitions, because with contiguous acres they get better rates and a bigger signing bonus. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? The signing bonus? Hard to resist. A new truck, a new plow, a hydraulic splitter… you name it. Carries lots of temptation. The other kind of landowner, the one with principles, who wants solar or wind instead of the way drilling lays everything to waste, he’s going to be outvoted. It contaminates the water. Or there’s a good chance it will. You know that, don’t you?” He paused. I gave an ambiguous murmur and continued knuckles along his spine.

  “That signing bonus is so sweet. People are willing to risk it. And the one who isn’t tempted, well, angry neighbors is just the beginning of his nightmare. Back in the Thirties we had an oil boom here, but shale gas, that’s something different. Highly industrial. Mile-long wells, huge containment pools. Tanker traffic digging up roads. But the worst thing is what it does to the water. If you can’t use your water, what are you going to do? People will leave. McCarthys are smart. They’re selling and getting out now. They want the money, but they don’t want to live with the results. If I could do that, I would. But my business, it’s going to double, triple. So I’ll do their dirty work, then I’ll escape.”

  I only pretend to listen to my clients, because what I am really listening to is behind their voices. Twinges of pain and tenderness, points of resistance, that’s what I’m looking for as I move across their bodies. Now I was going down his leg, deep-gliding with my thumbs, and I said, “Yeah, but it’s hard to pick up your entire life, start over fresh someplace new.”

  “I’m ready. The human creature, it isn’t a tree. We’re a mobile animal.”

  There was resistance on his calf, and I was going into it with my thumbs. I could feel him wince. The light flickered as I murmured, “We’ll see.”

  “And if drilling doesn’t ruin this place, the ash
borer will.”

  “Ash borer?”

  “A small green insect moving its way north from Pennsylvania, eating the heartwood out of the ash trees.”

  “We have lots of ash.”

  “I’m sure it’s most of what you have, and it’s in Cattaraugus County now. Only a matter of time before it gets to Allegany.”

  “You’re full of good news, aren’t you?” But in truth, I was just making talk; my concern was with the real issues under my hands. I pulled the covers up to his neck and gently rocked him side to side like a baby. All the stiffness was gone.

  Often I end the session at the client’s head. I cradle it in my hands, my fingers working the suboccipital muscles where I believe Bruce’s headaches originate. Then I focus on the face. This is my favorite part. It’s rare when something hurts on the face, and my fingers knead and stroke like a mother comforting a worried child. It’s going to be all right. Everything will work out. I put this message into my touch, and I tap, All’s well. All’s well. You are a loved person. My hands tapping, circling, pressing.

  Bruce always leaves a hefty tip, and as I put the bills away in my drawer, I thought to myself, No place is perfect. Every rural location is under siege from something, and if you don’t like it, then go to the city, where wildness is ruined already and lawns and parks are the only form of nature you get.

  I call myself a massage artist. I know it’s arrogant, but it’s a thing I say only to myself. And I say it because every body I work on has an entirely different set of needs, and so I don’t use the same routine on any two people. That would get boring. I did study all of that stuff about systems—the muscular, the nervous, the lymphatic, the skeletal—and I can identify everything under the skin at any location. Easy stuff, easy, but do I use it in my work? Rarely. It’s not a matter of knowing systems; it’s a matter of emptying that kind of knowledge out and watching. My hands are highly trained instruments with eyes of their own. They feel a problem, and they know what to do. The remedy is in my fingers, my elbows, my palms, my knuckles, my thumbs. It’s in my complete relaxation and acceptance. If I’m tense and distracted, my client will feel it. So I stay focused. I bring warmth to ice, softness to stone. I find where my client has buried the shame and fear all of us carry around. I coax it away, and when it’s gone I fan the ground with love. Hokey as it sounds, but after all, my name is Ramona, she of the wise hands. I watch, I feel, I imagine. That’s why I can’t have music.

  In the early days, when I was fully and completely infatuated with Shep, I did him the same way. I listened and felt, and I think, I hope, that he, in his own blunt male way, did the same with me. Well, he did. I know he did. Because we developed this thing together. This life. He does the school; I do the garden, the chickens, and see about the bent and scarred bodies that come to me. It’s worked out. The two kids, the farm, and then when the kids left home, we decided, or I decided, and he agreed, on goats. We had the barn, added the fencing.

  I had fifteen minutes before my next client, so I went outside to the alley in back. There was a plastic chair out there; I think it’s a smoking station for someone who cooks at the restaurant, and that’s where I sit. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and breathed the clean winter air.

  It’s startling to go from a male to a female, and in particular, to go from a tall, ponderous man like Bruce to a small, nervous woman like Fern. She was in her early sixties, and her years of running a riding school kept her fit. The problems of her life went to her hips and lower back. Sometimes her piriformis was so tight I felt as though I were attempting to work metal. She liked the room cool, so I turned everything way down after Bruce left. She preferred me to work on her back. Some women feel undefended in the front, and Fern was one of them. I don’t question it. And even on her back, I was careful to readjust the coverings after I exposed an arm or a leg. It’s funny how protective people are. What is nakedness but a condition shared by us all? All variations are acceptable, and anyway, who’s to say what we should look like unclothed?

  “Wow,” I said, “what’s going on?” I was working on her upper back, gently pulling and shaking out each arm, pressing on the shoulder, but movement was inhibited. “Something happening in your life?” I added more gently.

  “I thought I was doing a decent job hiding it.” Her voice was wobbly with feeling.

  I squirted more oil into my palms and moved up and down the canvas of her back as though I were spreading paint. Working quickly, loosening the fascia, moving heat into the muscles. I pulled the covers up to her neck and, lifting her thick grey hair to the side, I went back to her shoulders. I turned the sheet down at the very top. “I can listen,” I offered. As I said, I’m not eager for talk, but touch releases emotions, and Fern is a woman who has a habit of holding them in.

  She shot out a stream of breath. “It’s my competitor. Darla Oswald. The only other person around here with horses. We’ve never been friends. I’ve tried, but it’s a lost cause. She’s just too ambitious to be interested. And aggressive as hell. She has more horses, more stables, a bigger riding ring, but I have more trails. Anyway, we compete for students. And she has too many horses. They’re crowded and don’t get enough exercise.

  “So—but this is between you and me, okay? I don’t want this spread around.”

  I said what I always say: “Anything I hear in this room stays here.”

  “Good. Well, the phone rings. This was last week. And there’s this loud, aggressive voice. ‘Fern Snyder,’ she says. ‘Darla Oswald. Bet you never expected to hear from me, did you? I have a proposition. Are you ready?’

  “No ‘How are you? How are your horses?’ She’s so brazen. Just goes straight to it. Like she’s the President and has no time for a lowly person like me. So I took her down a notch. I said, ‘Hello, Darla. How are you doing? Congratulations on those wins you took at State last September.’

  “But Darla doesn’t do conversation. ‘I need to know something fast. Because I have to act soon. Life is biting my tail, so to speak. Fern...’

  “‘Yes,’ I say. Now I’m a little nervous. What does this woman want with me?

  “‘I’m moving. Going back to where I grew up. Maybe just for a couple of years, and I can’t take all of my horses. What I want to know is, would you be interested in looking them over and making me an offer for five or six?’

  “‘Moving? Whatever for? You’re so established here.’ We’re competitors, but I like having someone else doing the same thing. It means it’s not just me out there trying to convince people that riding and keeping horses is a great way of life. If she left, a full one-half of the equestrian scene would leave with her. That’s a huge loss. So I’m feeling put out and a little angry.

  “She says, ‘Lookit, I want you to think it over and give me a call when you decide.’”

  Women who do a lot of riding have unbelievable upper thighs. The muscles on the insides of their legs are larger than anyone’s. But hers were rigid. I oiled up and did a fast hand-over-hand glide, pausing to shake the flesh. Then I moved to her feet. I pulled my stool around to the end of the table and picked one foot up, tucking the covers around her leg so nothing would be exposed, and began. There are fourteen thousand nerve endings in the feet, and I know how to stimulate every one of them. Fern has never said anything to me about her feet, which are thick and wide but flat. Like pancakes. No lift, which is why her hips have to carry it all.

  All women, but Fern especially, need to have their toes worked. Toes are what roll our weight forward. And when there are burdens, toes are what hold them. Most women, at one time or another, have broken one. That’s because when the burden is too heavy, the way too rough, it’s a toe that gives out. So I give real time to a woman’s toes. Each and every one of them.

  “I had a hunch about something,” Fern said. “So I took a chance. I said, ‘Darla, when those leasing agents came to my place I ran them off. Sounds like you invited them in for a cup of coffee.’

  “‘What are you
talking about?’

  “‘The Marcellus. The gas. The get-rich-quick guys who are running around this county leasing land.’

  “‘I’d never lease the mineral rights to my place. And I’d never sell it. I’m just closing it up for a couple of years, and going back to New Hampshire. If you must know, it’s because my parents are getting old. So I’m suspending everything here for a little while, and doing things on a smaller scale at my parents’ place, which is why I can’t take all of the horses. And, Fern, you’re not the only person I’ve approached. So think about it and get back to me, and I’ll take the highest offer I get.’”

  Fern has a very long big toe. It’s a beautiful and noble creature, and it has room enough on the pad for me to get in and roll it around. I was working it with my thumbs when I said, “You’re going to make an offer?”

  “First of all, I don’t believe a word of it. This is not a woman who drops everything to take care of elderly parents. You and I might do that, but not Darla. There is something else going on. Who knows? Something bigger and more important to her, because, in effect, her leaving for a year or two means I’ll take over. She’s willing to give me that opportunity because something’s drawing her away that’s worth it. What it is, I don’t know. This is not a woman I’m friends with. Maybe she’s after a man.”

  “So go check out her horses. Do it before you get cold feet.” I said this while still on the toe, and something icy grabbed the back of my neck when she replied, “She’ll be in New Hampshire this weekend. Otherwise, I would.”

  One of the best things about Andover is the town of Alfred, seven miles away. There’s a college there and that’s where the salon, with my back room, is located. There’s also a couple of restaurants, and a small grocery that gets fresh fish and bread every Thursday. Helene, who runs it with her stepfather, William Swick, who owns the used bookstore next to it, drives up to Rochester very early every Thursday morning and brings it back. I go there every week, after my last massage, and buy whatever I need. Sometimes I make a request and they’ll have it for me on Thursday.